Experimental Abilities

As characters explore, they may encounter Abilities that fall out of their Class. These will be detailed on this page, as well as how to access them.

All Experimental Abilities cost 1 XP to purchase as with regular Abilities, unless otherwise specified.

Any of:

• Suffer the CURSE effect from a Decaying creature three or more times.
• Have the CURSE effect of a Decaying creature that causes you to call DRAIN trigger by being knocked unconscious.
• Take a Severe Injury from a Decaying creature.

• Some aspect of Decay that has burrowed deep inside of you. Excising this will be difficult (and a method is not yet known), but through experimentation you are able to tap into the corrosive and detrimental power that Decay can provide its puppets.
• Abilities in the Ouroboros tree are powered by surrendering parts of your body over to the Decay attempting to seize your body for itself for the duration of the Encounter. When a part of your body is given over (e.g., your arm), you should roleplay with that limb actively attempting to impede or attack you. If it has a weapon, for instance, it will attempt to hit you with it. If not, it may smack you in the face or attempt to wrestle your other limbs. This effect will wear off at the end of the encounter you trigger it within.
• Each ability purchased will increase the amount of your body that is given over - each time you trigger any Ouroboros ability, all the affected area will turn against you. You may only sacrifice each area of your body once.
• You may choose to purchase Ouroboros abilities during an Encounter if your character has spare XP.
• Amputation of the affected area will not help, the Decay will simply move somewhere else within you.
• If you give over more than half of your body to the Decay within yourself your mind will become destroyed by the Decay and you will become an unplayable Puppet of Decay - assume the stats of a Lesser Dominator if this occurs during an Encounter.

• When you activate this ability, for the rest of the Encounter, you may call PING to any effect that strikes your melee weapon.
• Purchase Sacrifice: You must sacrifice one hand to the Decay within yourself to purchase this ability.

• When you activate this ability, you gain a pool of 3 uses of BREAK for the rest of the encounter. These are lost if unused.
• Purchase Sacrifice: You must sacrifice control of your upper arm to the Decay within yourself to purchase this ability.

• When you activate this ability, you may choose to call PING to PUSH or PULL while you are walking slowly. This effect does not apply if you are stationary or running.
• Purchase Sacrifice: You must sacrifice control of your speech to the Decay within yourself to purchase this ability.
  • Decay has no intent or advice to speak, it will turn your expressions gutteral, grinding, and screeching.

• When you are knocked unconscious, you may choose to sacrifice further elements of your body to the Decay within yourself in order to get back up on half your body hits. These sacrifices are as permanent as any other.
• Valid locations:
  • Hand (either one)
  • Upper Arm (either one)
  • Foot (either one)
  • Leg (either one)
  • Chest (your organs are against you - you will feel nauseous and short of breath)
  • Mouth (Decay controls your words - either to speak or to prevent you from doing so)
    • Decay has no intent or advice to speak, it will turn your expressions gutteral, grinding, and screeching.
  • Eyes + Ears (both) (you are blinded but do not close your eyes)

Any of:

• Be granted permissions from the control panel of a Gateway found within a Pentagonal Ruin. These are single use.
• ???

• You have become aware on a level of how to control and interface with the ancient mechanisms that survive in the Pentagonal Ruins that have been found in the Keter Borderlands.
• In particular, you are aware of how to operate their Gateways and how to direct the Guardians of their Crypts. In particular, you know that a Gateway connected to multiple other Gateways can be used by anyone to travel between them, there is no requirement to reconfigure, and that these connections are inherently bidirectional.
• Where roleplay is required, you should roleplay becoming aware of pathways in the world and the air around you, and drawing connections between them.
• When you gain access to this tree you gain the Initialise Gateway and Direct Crypt Guardians abilities for free.

• You become aware of how to activate a dormant Pentagonal Gateway so that it can be used to transport between itself and the Gateway it is currently connected to.
• With 10s of roleplay at a Gateway you may interface in order to perform one of the following operations:
  • Synchronise - the Gateway becomes aware of and connected to any Gateway that you are aware of and it is not. You become aware of the location of any connected Gateway that this Gateway knows of that you do not.
  • Delete - you may remove the knowledge of one Gateway from this Gateway. It is no longer connected to it.
  • Initialise - a dormant Gateway becomes active and reconnects to any Gateway it is aware of.

• With 10s of uninterrupted roleplay you may call YOU: PUSH or YOU: PULL on a Crypt Guardian (Strike and Support Rollers only)

• You may use the privileges given to you by the Gateway to temporarily open a small hole in space.
• Once per Encounter you may call WARP and then reposition yourself within 10s, calling WARP again when you reappear.

• You may expand your PUSH and PULL calls on Crypt Guardians to all inhabitants of Pentagonal Crypts beyond just Strike and Support Rollers.

• Utility Ability
• You gain the Reprogram ability specifically for Crypt Guardians (of any variety).

• Once Ever Downtime Ability
• Once ever you may open your mind to the pathways and workings of the Pentagonal Civilisation, becoming aware of their workings and how to copy their work.
• This will set you down the course of a Retirement Linear, the details of which will only be apparent to you if you choose to accept it.
• Contact the GMs if you activate this Ability.

Acquire an appropriate Experimental Weapon by any of:

• Long term faction gift
• Successful Tinkering with Mk II
• Star Pact gift

• You may take an exotic heavy weapon with you into combat (requires an appropriate two-handed phys-rep), and gain the following ability with its given caveat.
  • Flamethrower - you may charge this weapon to call BURN. You must decide when you start charging it whether you are charging for BURN or another call - if you are charging for BURN and take damage, you must immediately call MASS BURN as it explodes and resets the charging.
  • Tesla Coil - you may charge this weapon to call ZAP, and this weapon is immediately charged when you take a ZAP. You can only move at a walking pace while wielding this weapon.
  • Bazooka - you may charge this weapon to call BLAST, but the charging roleplay must be uninterrupted and performed while stationary.
  • Minigun - once per Encounter you may plant yourself on the spot and may charge your weapon to call YOU: PEW with only 2s of roleplay until you next move.
• Additional weapons may be added as they are invented.

All of:

• Have been infected with parasites by virtue of suffering an untreated relevant CURSE call.
• Actively choose to cultivate the parasite OR are a Various.
• Parasite has not been removed.

• You have become a symbiotic host for some alien parasite. Over time you may cultivate your parasites to be more effective.
• The stats given by this tree are a base: some parasites may come with an additional base stat depending on how you acquired them.
• If something happens to you that results in the parasites dying off or being removed, you will lose access to this tree and the XP spent here is refunded.

• For every ability you take in this tree, you will feel a greater attachment to your parasitic spawn that is being generated from the parasite: you may become aggressive or hostile if someone attempts to remove your parasite.
• If you take a Severe Injury while you have any XP spent in this tree, you must perform the following when the current Encounter ends:
  • Draw X cards from the Tinkering deck where X is the amount of XP you have spent.
  • A huge wave of parasites will spawn (of a number equivalent to the Tinkering draw, with Consequences counting as 0) from you at their stats as if you had spawned them but hostile to everyone except their host.

• Utility Ability
• Once per Mission, outside of combat, you may hatch off one of your parasitic partners to aid you. Request a spare Monster to join you until such time as the parasite dies.
• At base, this parasitic friend has the following stats:
  • 1 hit
  • 1 short weapon
  • Squishy: Dies immediately upon being reduced to 0 hits.
  • Nonsapient: The parasite is not very clever but will not attack its host or their party, and it will respond to threats.
• This parasite can be HARVESTed if you desire.

• Your parasitic spawn are chunkier and more resilient and have the following stat increases:
  • +2 hits
  • May choose to take a small Shield instead of its weapon

• Your parasitic spawn is capable of doing more damage and has the following stat increases:
  • Weapon is now a standard melee weapon
  • 1 use of STRIKEDOWN

• You may use Spawn twice per Mission instead of once.

• Your parasitic spawn is now capable of following simple one-word orders from you to the best of its ability.

• Requires: 3 other abilities from Exofauna Symbiote
• Your parasitic spawn is capable of infecting others and gains the following ability:
  • Infect: With 10s of roleplaying over an enemy on 0 hits, you may call CURSE. The CURSE effect will lay eggs into the victim.

• Gain knowledge or experience of ship hearts which gives you insight into their existence, metaphysically, as defined in the skills below.

• This is not a traditional 'skill tree', in that you do not need to spend XP to gain the levels of knowledge below. You do, however, need to meet the unlock preconditions at each level. This is a mechanical way to codify levels of understanding of ship heart metaphysic between players.
• Note that just gaining knowledge of these things through hearsay (or reading research papers) is not sufficient to unlock each level - you must, yourself, have been engaging with ship hearts in metaphysically significant ways in order to gain the innate, internal knowledge of their function that these 'skills' represent.

You have had a metaphysical interaction with a ship heart and now have a vague understanding that ship hearts have some kind of life cycle.

You have had a metaphysically significant interaction with one or more ship hearts. You are aware that:

• It is not actually accurate to describe what you are aware of as a ‘life cycle.’ Ship hearts do not have the experiences one might associate with a ‘life cycle’: birth, reproduction, old age, etc. What you feel you are beginning to understand is in fact better seen as a progression.
• A key thing you start to grasp is the progression, in particular, of a ship heart’s personality. Ship heart personalities are influenced by the interactions they have with people they are exposed to - both Startouched and not. The more of these interactions a ship heart has, the more well-defined their personality becomes, and this is therefore usually most pronounced as an effect during a ship heart’s early exposure to people.
• You can infer from this understanding that there might be a point at the start of this ‘progression’ where a ship heart has not yet interacted with people, and that at this point it might have no personality at all.
• General knowledge of ship hearts, plus the knowledge of what has happened with Endeavour, add an extra data point to this understanding: once a ship heart personality has formed, it does not usually change - but it can change, though you suspect that some significant event is needed to achieve this.

You have had multiple metaphysically significant interactions with multiple ship hearts, and you have come to as strong an understanding of their existence as any non-ship-heart is likely to ever have. You are aware that:

• It is not actually accurate to describe a ship heart’s ‘life’ as a ‘progression.’ Ship hearts do not change according to the passage of time in the same way we do. While their personalities can undoubtedly progress, considering a ship heart to be entirely defined by the personality they develop during their early exposure to people is ignoring so much else of what ship hearts are or can be. Also, ship heart personalities can shift dramatically under traumatic influences.
• You are aware that there is some kind of interaction or link between ship hearts and Decay. However, you cannot fully grasp this unless you have also had metaphysically significant interactions with the Decay (see the GMs if you believe this applies to you).
• A ship heart has no personality until its first exposure to people. Prior to this, it is in an ‘unattuned’ state where it has no awareness of anything going on around it. Once it becomes aware of its own existence, it will start to ‘attune’ and develop a personality influenced by its surroundings.
• There is no meaningful upper limit to the power which a ship heart can bring to bear on the world, though in practice they are limited by the ship heart’s conscious personality’s awareness of what is, or should be, impossible.
• However, this means there is also no meaningful upper limit to the destruction which can be unleashed when a ship heart ‘explodes.’ Ship hearts can be thought of as vast reservoirs of potential power, which can release in horrifically destructive ways if destabilised. This destabilisation can come from without - physical damage to a ship heart - or within, if the ship heart’s personality believes it cannot physically do what it is doing.

• Be assimilated by the The Squeeple and make the choice to join them willingly.

• Squeeper Agent skills may only be unlocked one at a time – you must go out on a Mission and provide something useful to the Squeeple in order to unlock another one.
• You may detach yourself from the Squeeple by choice at any time, but this will immediately give you a permanent -100 Clout with the Squeeple.

• Utility Ability
• You may freely call SCAN: SQUEEPLE and SCAN: SQUERSON SQUINTESSENCE
• You count as a Squerson for the purposes of being healed by a Squerson.
• When you reach 0 HP you always call HEAL 3 on any nearby Squerson Squintessence.
• When you take a third Severe Injury, instead of dying your mind will be redistributed into the Squeeple and you will become part of a Scourge Antagonist.

• Utility Ability
• You become aware of the core of the Squeeple – an entity deep under the oceans of Siruta – and can access its stores of information.
• Twice per mission, out of combat, you may ask a question of the shared knowledge and it will give you an answer if it knows it.
• Talk to a GM to use this ability.

• Twice per Encounter you may call YOU: SLOW as you splatter them with sticky squid goo.

• You are able to move and breath underwater without hindrance.
• Effects from underwater encounters do not affect you.
• You take BURN for 3s longer and SLOW for 5s less.

• Once per Mission, with 30s of appropriate roleplaying, you are able to move your consciousness into the empty shell of a dead creature, abandoning links to your own body.
• Your hit points become equal to those of the creature you now inhabit, but you maintain your skills.
• It is not immediately apparent to others that you have done this.
• Call TIME FREEZE when you do this if you are in combat.